With Charles, all begins, always, with Jesus. Jesus is 'our beloved Brother and Lord'. The one who loves us and whom we love is - astonishingly - our Brother: astonishingly, for Charles first discovered him as God-with-us and as the Lord who gives and asks all. Our Brother because he is 'one of us' and because he 'shares our human condition' (cf Hebrews chapters 2 and 5 and Gaudium et Spes 22). As we know, Charles is particularly struck by the fact that Jesus shares our Nazareth situation: our simple ordinariness, with its daily routine of work, monotony and anonymity, as also the poverty and abjection of so many. And it is as our Brother that Jesus is 'obedient' to the Father, and 'journeys' towards the Father. An obedience in trust, a journey through suffering... that he calls us to 'follow'. 'I am ascending to my Father and to your Father' (John 20,17): this movement covers the whole of Jesus' life, from his boyhood to his death and glorification (cf Luke 1,50, 9,51, 23,46). And it is precisely as our Brother that Jesus, 'the firstborn among many brothers' (Rm 8, 3o), draws us along with him, to share his life in our here-and-now and, in the end, his destiny. It is, that is, as our Brother that he shares our life, in all its humanness, and, by so doing, invites us to share his life of sonship with the Father, so that we are with him 'sons in the Son'(St Augustine).

For Charles, Jesus as our Brother, applies not only to Christians, but also - and equally - to every person, whatever their religion or lack of it. Charles sees Jesus primarily in his Nazareth situation: he is among us as our brother. A brother first to those who are of his family, to those who recognize and accept him; but a brother equally to all those around, to each and every person in the 'village', and, risen from the dead, to each and everyone everywhere, in each and every generation. A brother, moreover, who is present, walking with each person in their life journey. This truth, that Charles instinctively came to see, is, I think, a new discovery of our time. In fact to my mind, it only comes to clear expression in the first encyclical of John Paul, his program/encyclical Redemptor Hominis. Commenting on Gaudium et Spes 22, he declares: 'with man - with each man without any exception whatever - Christ is in a way united, even when man is unaware of it'; and again, 'each one of the four thousand million human beings living in our planet has become a sharer in Jesus from the moment he is conceived'.

Let's analyze Œbeing a brother¹. It is, surely, based on a recognition of equality: of being equally human, of being of equal worth, and so of having an equal dignity. This leads to an attitude of respect, and to its practical corollary, an attitude of concern. The whole of Charles' experience in the I Hogger is a witness to his growth in this recognition of others, so different in appearance, in culture and in religion, as being his equals, and hence as being worthy of respect. ' We are all brothers, and we hope one day to share the same heaven' (1904). Notice the two levels of being brothers: as humans, and as having the same destiny. Charles' approach is always to begin with the practical and obvious human needs, and to work 'upwards' to the cultural and the religious.

A young Touareg girl, as she then was, recalled long after, how she would enjoy visiting the Marabout, 'He always smiled. and he never kept us waiting'. A simple enough remark, but full of meaning. For Charles was working long hours on his Touareg dictionary, and he was a man of intense concentration and strict routine, never willing to waste a minute. Yet he was able - he became able - to 'waste time' with a canal child's visit, and to do so with pleasure. All his European visitors remark on his extraordinary capacity for work. Dr Claude Herisson, for example, was amazed at his industry: he read his meteorological instruments thrice daily, he received and answered meticulously an enormous mail, he noted down any fragment of Touareg verse on envelopes slit open and attached with a string to his belt, he welcomed numerous visitors, he had a detailed rhythm of prayer. And yet, adds the doctor, he was always ready to converse: on Christmas eve (1909) he laid aside his devotions, and spent long hours reminiscing and exchanging views, knowing that the doctor was a nonpractising member of the Reformed Church and that he needed company.

How did Charles come to achieve this simplicity of relating to people of all kinds? Partly, no doubt, through assimilating the ways of Jesus, fruit of his meditation, adoration and short repeated prayers. Partly, also, through learning to receive as well as to give. He came to the Touaregs with much to give: medicine, his native culture and the religion he had been given. But falling desperately sick, in January 1908, he was saved by his neighbors: they brought him goats' milk and barley bread, though it was a time of severe drought and famine. Relations changed, becoming reciprocal and natural: at the end, Moussa, the local chief, said, 'He was one of us'.

As I see it, there is today a 'call' for a greater realisation of brotherhood. Brotherhood, of course, is a relational term: it expresses a certain way of inter-relating, a way marked above all by a sense of equality, more exactly by a recognition of the other as having a human worth equal to what I am aware of as my own human worth.

This sounds obvious! But experience - our experience of our own reactions and actions as well as our experience of how we see others acting - shows, all too clearly, we tend to 'down-grade' others. This is true both on the person to person level, and on the group to group level. I tend to see myself as 'first' and 'more', and, correlatively, you as 'second' and 'less': less not just in this or that quality, but less in human worth, less in humanness. Anger reveals these attitudes: 'you don't know', 'you don't care', You're just an animal'. And we all know the group reactions: 'they're not like us, they don't know how to behave, they've no responsibility, they're worse than beasts'.

Why is this? We learn, I think, to become aware of'I' through the actions of others towards me as being for them a genuine 'I', and, later, my own reactions towards these others show me their '1', and simultaneously our 'we', in both cases implicitly as being human and being equally human. The problem comes partly with the acceptance of members of another, 'outside' group, and partly with the new self-awareness of the adolescent, leading to a new self-importance. Both these attitudes are, in themselves, natural and positive: a true sense of self, a true sense of group solidarity. But it requires free acts of recognition of the other or others, and acceptance of them, and this free choosing of what is good does not happen of itself. In fact it needs the 'givenness' of self-lowering, of which the Incarnation is the model, to be able to do it.